


Empty Drowning

by ShinjiShazaki



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Gen, pre-Frontierstuck, sexual orientation guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-14
Updated: 2011-09-14
Packaged: 2017-10-23 18:00:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/253234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShinjiShazaki/pseuds/ShinjiShazaki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A companion/prologue piece to Frontierstuck.</p><p>Before she committed the taboo that launched them to Alternia, Rose Lalonde wanted to know if being attracted to women was normal in the 1910s.</p><p>It was not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Empty Drowning

Sprinting through the streets of New York City with a stolen book in her arms, Rose Lalonde considered a great many things.

The first was an idle noting of the fact that, at fourteen, she really hadn’t turned out too differently from her older brothers. There was a disparity between her eldest brother’s camorra murders and the petty theft of books, true, but the reality of her running at Dave Strider’s heels with stolen merchandise in hand remained.

Atop this first moral deviance was the second that had caused her turn to crime in the first place. She had tried her best to keep from letting the fault spread to the others; it still niggled in the back of her mind. As she and Dave rounded a corner and hid beneath an open stairwell, she panted and tried to understand why she had started noticing that Jade Harley was a very pretty young girl.

By every right, that made absolutely no sense. She could not divide objectivity from subjectivity, and she, as a burgeoning scientist, was consumed by a sense of intrinsic disdain at the notion. It was not an issue of if Jade was pretty as a matter of course; it did not matter that it was a fact John and his father and grandfather and even her own mother agreed upon. It was Rose and only Rose who felt incredibly strange when Jade giggled and insisted upon holding her hand when they walked around the Harley estate or in the small town beyond.

It was an inversion of what she thought she needed to feel. Where others might grow weary of Jade, annoyed with her giggles and her smiles, Rose was happy to be near her. She liked to hear Jade laugh, even if she wasn’t very good at making her laugh in the first place. She liked the touch of her hand. She found she liked Jade’s smile more than anyone else’s, and when she realized it she began to study the curve of her lips in an attempt to understand why.

In their rare journeys to the town or her travels to visit Dave in the city, Rose made to investigate her results and try to replicate them. It was a success she hadn’t expected: the smiles of men, the sound of their laughter, and the very angles of their bodies were completely unremarkable. In her youth, she had known her mother was a picture of femininity, grace, and beauty. Then, women caught her eye, but there was no real sense of envy. True enough, she wished for her teen gawkiness to end, but for another reason entirely.

Jade giggled about the boys she hoped would look at her when she was a little older.

Rose wanted women to look at her and examine the curved lines of her body.

That was how she came alone to the city with a plan to acquire any literature at any cost. Dave had acquiesced without question: her visits often involved the perusal of bookstores for any number of tomes. When she tried to slip away from their usual areas of science and into matters of a more adult persuasion, he followed her doggedly and with a raised brow. She tried to ignore him, but whipped her hands away from the high shelf she reached toward when he snorted a sigh.

“What the fuck are you doin’ over here?” he whispered. “Chemistry’s back over here.”

“Nothing,” she muttered. “I’m just curious.”

“About fuckin’ what? How to pitch woo?”

“About matters of human nature.”

“Since when is pitchin’ woo part of that?”

“Dave,” she hissed, “I’m sure you understand that ‘pitching woo’ was involved in our creation.”

“It don’t really fuckin’ matter right now,” he replied. “We’re just figurin’ how the body’s constructed and all the other chemistry and biology shit. I thought that’s what we came in here for.”

“A curious mind is necessary for science, brother.”

He opened his mouth to reply, but they both turned at the sound of floorboards creaking and announcing a new arrival. The shopkeeper stared down at them, pince-nez clamped on a sharp-cut nose and a frown wrinkling his face. He demanded, “What are you kids doing back here?”

They absconded to the sound of the man roaring after them, and it was only when they were a block away that Rose realized why he had shouted. She felt the book in her hands and tucked it immediately under one arm. When they had made good their escape, she refused to let Dave see the book. She herself didn’t look at it until they had returned to the apartment Dave and their elder brother occupied and she had hidden herself away in their guest bedroom.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, almost bent double, she took the book out from beneath her arm and looked at the cover. The title and author stared back up at her: _Sexual Psychopathy_ , by one Doctor von Krafft-Ebing.

She almost threw the book away then and there. Somehow, she managed to find her way to the corner of the room furthest from the door, curled up against the sharp angles, and opened the book to start reading.

\-------

_I thought briefly about kissing Jade today._

_It was a terrible thought. It sickened me. She is only a step removed from my sister. And so I stopped thinking about her—but I started thinking of other women. I found I liked the idea of kissing them._

_It sickened me as much as the thought of kissing Jade._

_It has taken me a solid ten minutes between writing the last sentence and this one. My disgust is tangled. I want_

_I want to kiss a woman._

_But it is wrong. I have read it in scientific medical texts._

_But_

_I want to kiss a woman. I am fifteen years old and I_

_I want to kiss someone._

_Jade and John have told me they want to kiss people. They are younger and older than I. Surely now is the time to want to kiss someone. Despite his mockery of the purpose of—adult doings—he told me in his last letter he kissed someone. He says he kissed a very pretty girl with black hair. He says she giggled. When I told Jade, she giggled that giggle of hers and said she’d laugh, too. She says it would make her happy to be kissed._

_Why do I want to kiss a woman?_

_Why am I sick like this?_

_Why do I have to be sick when all the people I know are normal?_

_Why can’t I make myself want to kiss a boy? I hate the idea so much more than wanting to kiss a woman._

_Why am I so wrong?_

_This doesn’t make sense._

_I don’t_

_I don’t think anyone will love a homosexual alchemist._

Rose tore the pages out of her journal and pulled one of the Thorns of Oglogoth out of nothingness. She flicked lightning at the lamp on her desk to replicate the metal and pulled over the tray that formed from it. The torn pages she put in the tray; another tap set them ablaze. They were ash within minutes.

When there was a knock at her door, she blinked and realized there was wetness on her face. She scrubbed at her cheeks with one hand and returned the metal of the tray into the lamp with the other. She did not respond, and there was soon another knock sounding.

Jade called, “Rosie?”

The tears nearly welled over again; she pinched her eyes shut and wiped them dry. A third knock came before she said, voice barely breaking, “Come in.”

The door opened to let Jade peek her head inside. There was tentativeness in her smile. “Can I come in?”

“I just said you can.”

“Usually when you say I can come in, you just mean I can open the door and tell you whatever it is I came to tell you. But I mostly just want to talk, so—”

“Jade, just come in.”

“Okay.” She walked in, closing the door behind her before moving to sit on Rose’s bed. Though she laced her fingers and put her hands in her lap, her smile lost its anxiety. “Can I talk to you about something?”

“Jade, you just said that you came to talk.” She waved a hand to dismiss any coming explanations and protests and said, “It’s fine. What did you want to talk about?”

“Well...” She twiddled her thumbs and looked at her hands. “Do you think boys would like us?”

Rose froze in her chair.

“I’d really like a boy to kiss me,” Jade said. “And I think I’d like to get married someday.”

Her throat slammed shut.

“Do you think someone would like me?”

She turned her head slowly to look away. She crossed a leg at the knee and put her hands in her lap, one atop the other. She clenched the hand that was hidden into a fist so tight it felt as though her fingernails would cut her palm.

“Rosie, do you think that’s strange? I mean, we don’t believe in God, and I think you have to believe in God if you want to get married. But I guess maybe if you don’t want to get married in a church, you can just get married by someone else.” She went quiet for a long few moments. “I wish I could talk to my mom about this. I think she’d understand better than Grandpa.”

“That’s why we’re figuring out a method to bring her back, Jade. So you can talk to _her_ about all of this.”

She looked up only to see the frown on Rose’s face. “Oh...yeah. That’s true, huh.”

“It is.”

A long pause of silence.

“Rosie?”

“What?”

“Do you ever talk to _your_ mom about this? You want to get married too, right?”

“I wouldn’t talk to my mother about anything like this if you paid me. Besides, I don’t have time to worry about that. I have our resurrection formula to work on, and that leaves little space in my mind to worry about something like romance.”

“But...it’s nice to think about liking someone. Isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t matter to me, Jade. I’m not saying it’s not important. It just isn’t to me.”

“Rosie...”

“ _What_?”

“That’s sad. You’re one of my best friends—I want you to be happy.” She stood suddenly and went to stand behind Rose. She wrapped her arms around Rose and hugged her tight. “You don’t have to think about alchemy all the time, you know. I can wait to see my mom again.”

Rose was terribly aware of two things. The first was that Jade was very warm. The second was that her body was beginning to develop, and her small breasts were pressing against her back. For a moment, Rose wondered if being held by another woman would feel as good as Jade’s hug. Every part of her, mind and body and heart, said yes.

“I’m on the brink of a major breakthrough in my theory,” she said. “Could you leave me alone for a while?”

“Oh.” Jade let go of her quickly. She stepped to the side to give Rose a sheepish smile. “Sorry. I didn’t really mean to interrupt you.”

“It’s fine, but I do need to get back to my work.”

“Okay.” She went to the door, pausing with her hand on the knob. “You’re going to come to dinner tonight, right? I don’t think you ate lunch.”

“Yes, I’ll be eating with everyone.”

Her smile grew cheerful. “Good! I’ll see you at dinnertime!” She departed with a wave and closed the door behind her.

Rose sat in stillness for a long time. She looked down at her hands, opening them slowly. There were tiny crescent cuts in her palm; blood oozed from them. With a blank face, she took out a needle and tapped it against her hand. Alchemy closed the wounds instantly, and she dismissed the needle. She turned back to her desk, opening her journal once more with every intention to burn what she wrote.

_I’d be deluding myself if I thought any woman would be interested in me, and I shouldn’t try to infect others. I wouldn’t subject my friends to it._

_I think it would be best if I focused only on alchemy. I know I can be alone if I have one thing in the world makes sense. Even if every other science and religion says I’m wrong, it’s okay if I just have alchemy. I know it’s right._

_And if I can discern the truth about what happens after death, then I’ll be right about something._

_Just_

_not about who I want to love._

_I don’t think alchemy can fix that._

_I wish it could._

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the questions raised on my tumblr.


End file.
